I first met Zach Braff a decade ago, having coffee in a cozy diner under the South Orange railroad station. He'd just finished directing his debut feature, and was about to take it to Sundance.

"Some people are poking their heads around already, so I have a feeling the film will get distribution," Braff said. "Obviously, though, I'm still nervous as to how it will be received."

That was 10 years ago, the movie was called "Garden State" and, yeah, it kind of worked out OK.

Fox Searchlight and Miramax teamed up to buy it and quickly turned it into a commercial hit; reviews compared the film to "The Graduate," and praised Braff's sharp eye and indie-rock ear. Many couldn't wait to see what he'd make next.

"I couldn't get the money," Braff says frankly, sitting in a plush suite at Manhattan's Waldorf Astoria. "Could not get the money. Maybe I could have, if I'd been ready to go right after 'Garden State' 'cause I was so hot right then -- but that hotness fades in six months."

By the time Braff did have a script ready to go, co-written with his older brother, Adam, the heat had cooled, and every serious offer came with strings.

"I mean, the way it works is, you show the script around and the financiers say, 'OK, we'll give you this much – if you do this,'" he says. "They have a list. Hire these actors, shoot in Vancouver, give up final cut – those were the deals that were presented. And I wasn't about to make all those concessions, and I didn't know what to do."

So Braff, 39, decided to do something a few other filmmakers had done: Put the whole project up on Kickstarter and ask the fans to fund it. And the real fans did, almost immediately. Some other people? Well, they basically tore into him.

"There was a lot of internet insanity," Braff says, a little wearily. "Everyone and their mother weighed in with their thoughts, and a lot of misinformation. First and foremost: 'Hey, you have money, go make it yourself.' Well, I do have money, yeah, but I don't have $5.5 million to spend on a movie, you know?"

"Certainly there was some negative press about it," Adam says later, phoning from his home in Hawaii. "But if you have that kind of online presence, that many fans, and you have the opportunity to rally them around something, why not? It's not illegal. It's not like Zach was taking advantage of anybody."

But that was sort of the charge – that asking fans to fund a star's comedy, even a decidedly offbeat one, was somehow wrong. That Kickstarter was for charities, or somebody's documentary on Albanian puppeteers. And although other commercial projects have raised money that way before (the "Veronica Mars" movie) and since (the latest Spike Lee picture) somehow it was Braff who got the smack-down.

It still stings a little.

It's like Kickstarter is the mall, he says, "and we're Macy's." You may go to the mall for Macy's, but you also walk past a lot of kiosks first, and maybe buy a couple of things along the way. So why would anyone want to scare Macy's away? We drew a lot of new visitors to the site, who helped fund other projects... And, it wasn't like I was trying to make 'Garden State II.' Or 'Scrubs: The Movie.' I was trying to do something a little different."

"Different" is definitely a keyword in describing "Wish I Was Here." Set in L.A., it stars Braff as Aidan, a thirtysomething actor struggling to get work while wife Kate Hudson holds down a crummy job and cares for their kids and his ailing father pays for two private-school tuitions. Aidan, frankly, is kind of a jerk – and it's his struggle to finally grow up that's the core of the movie.

"He's a narcissist who really hasn't been there for his family," Braff agrees, "but slowly he realizes you've got to show up. You've got to help your wife, you've got to help your kids, you've got to not be so selfish and find a way to fulfill your obligations and your integrity. Everyone's answer to that question is different; it's all specific to who we are. But for him, it's about showing up when called upon."

Braff's own family were professionals – his father an attorney, his mother a psychologist – but also huge lovers of the arts.

"My dad did community theater in Livingston, (New Jersey). We'd rent 16mm prints of things, we went to plays all the time – and then, my brother got a Super 8 camera," Braff remembers. "He was obsessed with James Bond films then, so he would recreate the Bond movies – he was 007, our sister was Moneypenny and I was – well, I was 10 years younger, so I'd be the evil little person."

("The killer dwarf," his brother explains later. "We'd lock him up in a suitcase and throw him out the window. Well, pretend to throw him out the window... Basically, we used him as a prop.")

Braff didn't immediately fit in at school. "I wasn't into sports at all, and in the South Orange public-school system, at least then, that was how you made friends. I mean I could make friends because I was the class clown, but I felt so alienated."

Then, one summer, his parents sent him to Stagedoor Manor, a sleepaway camp for theater geeks.

"That was like another country," Braff says. "It was like – my people! My home! I felt like baby Simba. And I was good, too, so I got the leads – which meant the girls liked me. It was like I was quarterback of the football team. I was sold, hook, line and sinker, and since then I've never, ever wanted to do anything else."

Braff was still in high school when he got an agent, and was cast in a CBS pilot ("Which didn't sell, thank God"). There were a lot of train trips in and out of the city, a lot of auditions for parts he didn't get. "Then Woody put me in 'Manhattan Murder Mystery," he says, "and my family started to think, I don't know, maybe he can do this."

His breakthrough came with "Scrubs," a show which debuted on NBC in 2001, ended its run in 2010 on ABC, and played lightly with format, mixing hospital comedy with fantasy sequences and musical numbers. It rescued Braff from the grind of low-budget movies and unsold TV pilots and even gave him a chance to direct a few episodes – a new experience that soon turned into a compelling drive.

In 2003, on a break from the series and in a rush – the entire shoot took about 25 days – Braff ran around Essex County filming what would become "Garden State," a movie about a young man having what Braff dubbed "a quarter-life crisis" as he tried to figure out where he was headed. It was a movie, Braff says, "that was all about what I was thinking about then, what my friends were thinking about."

At the time, of course, he was closing in on 30. Now, he's closing in on 40 – and so, "Wish I Was Here," while equally reflective, came from a different set of obsessions.

"I was thinking about getting older," Braff says of its genesis. "I was thinking about my brother, who is such a great, out-of-the-box dad. And I was thinking a lot about religion, too. I don't subscribe to a religion – not to say anything against it, if it works for you, mazel tov – but for those of us who don't have that, who don't believe in an afterlife, that makes the ticking clock even louder. You know, boy this is it. Am I really doing everything with my brief years on this planet that I can?"

Braff is certainly trying. In between "Scrubs" seasons he appeared in a few indie movies ("Tar," "The High Cost of Living," "The Last Kiss"), directed some music videos and did Shakespeare in Central Park; since the show was cancelled, he wrote one play, "All New People," set on Long Beach Island, starred in another off-Broadway one, "Trust," and played a flying monkey in the movie "Oz, the Great and Powerful."

There have been other film projects, too, although many stalled. He and his brother wrote a script based on a favorite childhood book, "Andrew Henry's Meadow" but, Adam says, "we pitched it as this big "Brazil" for kids, a children's summer action-movie -- back when they were making such things -- and it never took off." Several other proposals never seemed to get out of development.

So there have been disappointments. And the usual stresses of being a celebrity in 2014, in which for every nice thing you see about yourself on the internet you're guaranteed to see three of "the kind of mean tweets that get read on 'Jimmy Kimmel,'" Braff says, laughing.

Still, he seems to be handling it.

"Look, I'm his older brother, but I'm in awe of him sometimes," Adam says. "I see him walk around on the street, even out here in Hawaii, and people come up to him and he's always so gracious, so respectful... He's something else. He's a one-man band and I'm just glad I got the opportunity to be part of this."

"There's some (negativity) out there, but you can't let that affect you," Braff says. "And besides, the internet also allows me to target and have a direct conversation with fans, and make content just for them. So I can make a smaller film that's by no means for everybody, that's not going to be on 3000 screens, but is for a core fan base – and as long as they keep coming to what I'm doing..."

He shrugs.

"Look, I will do everything and anything to make my movies, come hell or high water," he says. "This is what drives me. It's like what I'm saying in 'Wish I Was Here' – this is it. This is life, this is all there is. These are the years you get, and if you're lucky you'll get 90 or so, but what are you going to do with them? Seize the day. Carpe diem, man."